DHAKA: On Tuesday, Bangladesh announced three days of official mourning in honor of Khaleda Zia, the nation’s first female prime minister and a significant player in the political landscape over the previous forty years.
When her husband, Ziaur Rahman, a hero of the 1971 Liberation War, was elected president in 1977, Zia became the first lady of Bangladesh. After her husband was slain four years later, she assumed leadership of his Bangladesh Nationalist Party and led the pro-democracy struggle after Hussain Muhammad Ershad’s military coup in 1982.
She first gained prominence after the BNP won the 1991 general election and became the second female prime minister of a mostly Muslim country, after Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan. She was arrested multiple times during demonstrations against Ershad’s reign.
In 1996, Zia led a brief government as prime minister, and in 2001, he was elected to a five-year term once more. After a protracted illness, she died on Tuesday morning at the age of 80 at a Dhaka hospital. As the government declared the mourning period, Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus remarked in a condolence statement that she was a “symbol of the democratic movement” and that “the nation has lost a great guardian” with her passing.
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